And so it is. Starting Monday, Pearls - a strip by Stephan Pastis that blends cute cartoon animals with biting, sarcastic humor - will return to the comics page.

“That’s fantastic,” Pastis said when told his strip had won the survey. “I’m thrilled. It’s tough for young strips to get a foothold.”

Pastis’ strip began in 2002, when he shifted over to cartooning after a nine-year career as a lawyer. It is now carried in about 450 newspapers and has been reprinted in eight books. The ninth, The Crass Menagerie, is due out in March.

“It always draws strong reactions,” Pastis said of his strip. “It’s frequently in the 10 most-hated list and the 10 most-loved list simultaneously. But I call that the ‘sweet spot.’”

Pastis splits his time between two jobs, one as a cartoonist and the other at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, where he makes sure that potential licensed products remain true to the spirit of the Peanuts comic strip and works on the board of directors. He is working with Schulz’s son, Craig, on the script for a new Peanuts Christmas special.

On Feb. 16, Pastis plans to be in Chapel Hill, participating in the Carolina Comedy Festival on the UNC campus with comedian Lewis Black.

“Tell everyone ‘thank you for voting for me,’” Pastis said.

Pearls got the biggest response of any of the six strips we ran in our comic survey, with more than 270 people writing in about it, about 70 percent of them voting in favor of the strip.

Also well-liked, but voted on by fewer readers, was The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee. It took a full week of the strip’s four-week run before the first negative comment came in. Told his was the first vote against the strip, the reader responded, “Now I’m starting to feel like an old curmudgeon.” He then amended his anti-Edison comment to say, “It’s by far the least lame of the ones so far.”

High praise indeed.

The Other Coast also got mostly positive feedback, with only two naysayers. But in terms of sheer numbers, both strips got only a small portion of the response that Pearls did. Pearls also kept getting votes all through the auditions of later strips.

The nays far outnumbered the yeas on Single and Looking and Secret Asian Man, but those who loved Asian Man tended to really love it and to let us know with all-caps and exclamation marks. Fans of Single tended to be more low-key in their responses.

Voters also felt obliged to tell us what they thought of other strips on the comics pages. Lio got a lot of hate mail, but we also heard from diehard supporters of that wacky little kid. For the record, we’re planning to keep Lio. The cartoonist goes too far sometimes, but humor that doesn’t push the boundaries sometimes isn’t usually funny for long.

“I think Lio’s great,” Stephan Pastis said, “because anything that draws fire away from me is great. It’s kind of like prisoners going over a wall together. They can only shoot at so many of us.”

We also heard from people confused about the changes in direction on Funky Winkerbean (the cartoonist jumped ahead in time and the characters are all older now) and For Better or For Worse (the cartoonist has been mixing new strips with reruns and will soon switch over to all reruns).

Some complained about the political content of Doonesbury, with one Pearls supporter declaring, “At least if Pearls Before Swine gets political, it will be ridiculously cute and funny doing it. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it!”

We even got a vote or two against Family Circus. And we heard from people listing strips that we’d better keep or they’ll cancel their subscription.

Several readers wrote in about current strips with jokes they just didn’t get. We could help them with most, but one Brevity from Dec. 5, 2007, stumped even us.

Some voters also made suggestions of other strips they felt we should add. Some were old strips that are well past their prime (sorry, folks, we won’t be bringing back Andy Capp) and some were suggestions that we’ve made note of for the next survey (we’ve heard you, Pickles fans).

Some asked for strips that we would love to have in the comics page, but they are no longer being produced. Fox Trot is no longer a daily strip, and Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, put down his pen and brush years ago.

And then there were those who wanted to audition themselves, with strips they had created. We appreciate the sentiment, but you need to send those to the comic syndicates and get into a lot of papers to make it worth your while.

Believe us, we know to listen to your opinions. One little girl (at least, the writer claimed to be a little girl) said that we shouldn’t discount her negative review of the strip Single and Looking just because she is 10. “I do not think that is wise,” she wrote, “for I am a smart child and I will think of ways to ruin you.”

Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at.

By Tim Clodfelter
JOURNAL REPORTER

John Hambrock knew from a young age what he wanted to do when he grew up - become a marine biologist. But somehow, cartooning got in the way.

His strip, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, will get a four-week trial run on the Journal’s comics pages starting Monday.

The central character is a 10-year-old boy genius with a knack for inventions, which allows Hambrock to tap into his love of science on a regular basis.

“I had science on my mind as a kid, and cartooning was totally off my radar,” he said. “I was probably one of the few kids that never thought about being a cartoonist. I was a huge fan of reading the comics, but I never thought about creating them.”

He got good grades in science, but even better grades in art class.

“I had a talent for art, and my teachers always encouraged me that way,” he said. “By the time I got to high school, I figured art was the direction to go.”

He attended college at Indiana University and Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, studying graphic design. Then he got a job at a graphics firm in Chicago. One of the firm’s accounts was with Keebler cookies. Between drawing the Keebler elves and creating a program for the Chicago public-school system with cartoon dinosaurs teaching nutrition, Hambrock began to think about cartooning.

Hambrock, who is 44, decided in 1991 that he wanted to be a cartoonist and mentioned the idea to his wife Anne. “I caught her off-guard,” he said. “It was ‘How was your day?’ ‘Great, but I want to be a cartoonist!’”

But Anne was also a big fan of comics. “She used to check out prospective boyfriends by showing them Charles Addams (The creator of The Addams Family) cartoons and seeing how they reacted,” he said. “She’s a big comics fan, a big New Yorker fan, while I’m more of a Mad magazine fan.”

She is the colorist for Edison Lee, and also serves as a sounding board for his ideas for strips. “I run stuff by her, and she comes up with ideas too,” he said. “I tell her what I’m planning, and if I get a stare or hear crickets, I know it’s something I shouldn’t pursue.”

He made several attempts to get a strip syndicated throughout the 1990s, and a precocious boy who was a secondary character in one of those strips eventually caught his imagination and became Edison Lee, the central character in the strip that he finally sold to King Features Syndicate. He spent years honing the strip, which finally made its newspaper debut in 2006.

Edison, the star of the strip, has a fascination with science and also politics. He enjoys pointing out the absurdities of modern life, and thinks he has all the answers - though that’s not always the case.

“Around the 2000 election, the strip started to take on a more political tone,” Hambrock said. He considers himself “an equal-opportunity satirist.”

“It’s not an anti-anything, it’s more a chance for Edison to point out what’s happening at the various levels in this country right now.”

The strip’s cast also includes Edison’s well-intentioned parents; his opinionated grandpa Orville; and Joules, his pet rat who helps out in his lab experiments.

The strip just celebrated its one-year anniversary in syndication, and Hambrock said he is not about to run out of ideas.

“It’s gotten much easier,” he said. “It’s interesting. When you’re starting off, and you’re trying to come up with ideas for strips, you think ‘How do people do this 365 days a year?’ The prospect of having to do this as a career, and in most cases on top of an existing career you have to maintain, is a challenge.”

Hambrock runs his own graphics firm, which he balances with his comic strip work. He and his wife live in Kenosha, Wis., with their three children, sons 16 and 13 and a daughter, 8.

He keeps folders of ideas for strips, jotting down jokes on whatever paper he can get hold of - bank statements, gum wrappers, and so on - and then pulling them out as needed when it comes time to create the strip. He never knows when the inspiration for a strip will strike.

“A lot of times it happens in the shower,” he said. “I wish someone would come up with waterproof paper.”

Sounds like a job for boy inventor Edison Lee.

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.

By Tim Clodfelter

JOURNAL REPORTER

Cartoonist Tak Toyoshima has been taking a comedic approach to touchy issues since 1999. But his strip, Secret Asian Man, has only recently made the jump from independent papers to newspaper syndication.

Premiering nationally back in May, it is the first nationally syndicated strip to feature an Asian American leading character - the titular “Secret Asian Man,” Sam Takahashi. Though he (like his creator) is of Japanese heritage, Sam is frequently mistaken for Chinese. His wife is white, and they have a 3-year-old son. The cast also includes an ethnically diverse mix of characters, including activist Grace, burly Charlie and well-intentioned-but-goofy Richie.

Sam is a cartoonist who makes wry comments about how people perceive Asian Americans and other ethnic groups, and how those people view themselves. He also tackles broader subjects of gender, religion and whatever else draws his attention.
Secret Asian Man will get a month-long tryout in the comics page of the Winston-Salem Journal starting Monday.
Toyoshima took some time away from his busy schedule - as both a daily cartoonist and the art director at a Boston weekly newspaper - for an e-mail interview about his work and what inspired him:

Q. Where did you grow up, and were you drawing from a young age?
A. I grew up in N.Y.C. (Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood) and as far back as I can remember I loved to draw. My dad was an artist in Japan, my mom designed clothes. My older brother and I used to play hours of Dungeons and Dragons, drawing our characters, creatures, armor, weapons and treasures. We were allowed to draw on the walls, and the loft that I grew up in had my Dad’s metalworking machines, so I pretty much grew up in a creative environment.

Q. What led you into a career as a newspaper cartoonist?
A. To be honest, it was a series of opportunities that led me down this path. I initially wanted to work in comic books for Marvel, DC or Image Comics. Comic-style illustration was definitely my strong suit, and after years of freelancing and self-publishing comics, I landed a gig as an inker for New England Comics’ hit book The Tick. I worked on that title for about four years as their main inker. It gave me the experience and confidence I needed.
While working on The Tick, I met a guy in Boston who wanted to start a monthly arts magazine. I would be the senior illustrator for it and was given two whole pages to fill with the first Secret Asian Man comic strips. It was a very grassroots operation with a shoestring budget, but we carried on for a couple of years and eventually the magazine grew into an alternative weekly paper, Boston’s Weekly Dig, where I am currently the art director. (http://www.weeklydig.com)
A couple of years in, we started running some comic strips. I started to get the itch to do comic work again and saw the opportunity to start one. It was a very different pace to work in strip format, but I got used to it and realized the great potential the medium had to offer and fell in love with it.

Q. What inspired you to create Secret Asian Man?
A. When I was touring comic book conventions for inking The Tick, it was a huge ego boost to have people come up and ask for autographs. But after a while I realized that it wasn’t necessarily me they were coming to see. They loved the character. That’s when I asked myself: If I were to start a comic book or strip, what would I write about? What do I know about better than anyone else in the world?
And the answer was my life, or more specifically, my experiences growing up Asian American. Stories from my childhood just came flying onto the paper and that’s how the strip started. It was about that time, too, that I became aware of the utter lack of Asian American representation in many forms of mass media and popular culture. There were plenty of exotic images depicting people from Asia, but none were accurate, as far as I felt, portrayals of us Asians born and raised in the States.
At first it was a very bitter and angry strip and served as a venting tool. I relished pushing people’s buttons and getting reactions. As the years went by (I started the strip in 1999) I started to do more research about notable Asian Americans and read about moments in our history. It all inspired me to get the word out about people and events that I was sure many did not know about.

Q. What is your creative process like?
A. Working on a daily strip definitely has its challenges. I also still work a day job and have a family, so it can be even more challenging to find the time, but I’ve developed a pace that seems to be working.
The strips always start as quick observations, punch lines or images. The hardest part about comic strips is the payoff at the end, so I like to start there. The observations come from everyday experiences, events from my past as a child, the news, popular culture, movies, TV political figures, etc. But always with an eye on things that either separate us or bring us together as groups - racial groups, religious groups, male vs. female, gay vs. straight, Republican vs. Democrat.
Once I take note of something, I try and see how I can create a strip that will bring those groups together. I like to think of the strip as a bridging text that doesn’t preach or push an ideology on people but instead presents things to think about for the readers to make up their own minds.

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.

Writers often talk about their characters taking over and pushing stories in directions they never expected.

That is what happened to Matt Janz, a cartoonist whose 5-year-old comic strip Out of the Gene Pool recently underwent a transformation.

Some of the original lead characters vanished, replaced by supporting characters who proved to have lives of their own. On July 30, the strip was renamed Single and Looking. It takes a cynical yet (occasionally) optimistic look at the dating scene, from the perspective of two very different singles.

One is Jackie, a divorced, 40-ish single mom who has “Prada tastes on a Payless budget” and a precocious son named Travis. The other single is Jackie’s friend, Sam, a geeky but good-hearted 20-something bachelor with a party-hardy roommate, a cute little critter named Zoogie. Rounding out the cast is Madame Red, a cantankerous woman who gets many of the strip’s funniest lines.

Janz is now in a relationship, but bases some of his strips on his single days and things his girlfriend mentions - or on anecdotes he hears from single friends.

“Jackie’s a little easier to write for,” he said. “When I write about her dating, I need to write about what’s wrong with the other person, and I have her react to that…. Sam, with his social ineptness, he tends to scare people away.”

Single and Looking is the third in the Journal’s six-month comic strip tryouts. It will run for the month of October, starting Monday on the right-hand comics page in the daily paper.

Janz, 37, lives in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in cartooning when he was 8, after a friend of his mother gave him a box full of Peanuts paperbacks.

“By the time I was 10, I had put together a comic strip that was a total rip-off of Family Circus,” he said. The strip, Dumbells (sic), was even drawn in a single, circular panel.

He took a stack of cartoons to his local library in Franklin Park, Ill., and asked if they would put them in their inventory. “Then a few months later they actually made a hardbound copy,” he said. The library gave Janz, then 11, a copy, and put one in the library - where it is still in circulation to this day.

Janz knew that he wanted to become a cartoonist when he grew up, but also knew how hard it was to break into the comic-strip industry. He became a graphic designer when he was 19 and, every few years tried his hand at developing comic strips to send off to the syndicates.

He knew he was on the right track with his strip Out of the Gene Pool when he got personal responses back from the editors at the syndicates, instead of the generic form letters that most cartoonists get. He tried self-syndicating his strip for a time (“I was making hardly anything, just paying for the postage to send it out”) and honed his art and writing. Then he tried again and got picked up by the Washington Post Writer’s Group syndicate.

For its first four years, his strip focused largely on Rufus, a homely everyday guy and his family, with Jackie and her son Travis and some other characters. Eventually, Sam - Rufus’ brother-in-law - became part of the strip and proved so popular with readers that he became one of the stars.

In the early days, newspaper editors frequently complained about how homely many of the characters were, especially Rufus and Madame Red.

“I set out to give them a cute character, but, I said, he’s going to be a real jerk,” Janz said. The result was Zoogie, Sam’s roommate, who resembles a mix of a koala bear and teddy bear. “If you’re around him a couple of minutes, you’re going to want to drop-kick him somewhere.”

Last year, Janz realized that the supporting cast was taking over the strip and decided to drop Rufus and his family altogether. “I had already started shying away from Rufus, and most of my writing was going to these other characters,” he said.

Though the dating lives of Jackie and Sam take center stage, the strip isn’t just about the singles scene. “It’s not to dating what Dilbert is to office life,” Janz said.

Readers shouldn’t expect Jackie and Sam to ever pair off with each other. “That Ross and Rachel stuff (from Friends) drives me crazy,” he said. “I’m pretty adamant, there’s no storyline down the road that will ever bring these two together. I’m thinking of some future strips that make it obvious that they are not interested in each other that way.”

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.

By Tim Clodfelter

JOURNAL REPORTER

Most of the time, cartoonist Tony Carrillo said, the responses that he gets to his comic strip F Minus are favorable.

“It’s about 90 percent positive,” he said by phone from his home in Tempe, Ariz. “The other 10 percent, it’s interesting what people will find to get upset about. No matter what topic I touch on, there’s bound to be someone out there to get upset.”

Take, for instance, clowns.

Yes, clowns.

“I did a couple of comics with a clown in it, and a clown wrote me and said I had offended this clown and all of clownkind by doing this. This image I had of a clown, sitting at home in full makeup typing a letter to me, just blew my mind.”

Starting Monday, readers of the Winston-Salem Journal will get a chance to see Carrillo’s work. F Minus is the second strip in our six-month cycle of test strips. It will run on the top right-hand corner of the comics section, with an e-mail address for reader response. Readers can also write in through “snail mail” or post comments on the Journalnow.com comics blog.

Carrillo, 25, lives a mile from the place he was born and raised in Tempe. “I’ve traveled around a bit and I haven’t found any place I like better than Arizona yet,” he said.

He created F Minus in 2003 while attending Arizona State University, where he was an art major. He saw an ad in The State Press, the student newspaper, looking for a cartoonist. “I hadn’t done any sort of cartooning prior to that,” he said, “but I thought it sounded like a fun job.”

He had already had more than his share of not-so-fun jobs, working as a portrait painter, insurance salesman, custom framer, waiter, camel-ride attendant and a dancing costumed character at an amusement park.

“I don’t know why, but I tended to go for unusual, tough jobs all through school,” he said. “I actually got punched in the head while wearing a bear suit. I’m glad I ended up in cartooning. It’s a lot safer.”

Rather than create a strip about a character, Carrillo decided he would rather draw a single panel with a self-contained joke each day.

“I really enjoy the freedom of the single panel strip,” he said. “A big influence on me was The New Yorker. You have a single panel and get straight to the joke.” But instead of drawing a square cartoon, the way most single-panel comics are done, he put his single panel in a long panel (“widescreen,” as he calls it), to fit in the space the State Press needed to fill. He has kept that format. “I was pretty sure from the start what I wanted my comic to be like,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s changed that much. I’m better with the art side than I used to be, but the style and content haven’t adjusted too much.”

He also decided that he couldn’t worry about comparisons to other cartoonists, such as Gary Larson, whose Far Side comic was one of the most popular single-panel cartoons in comics history.

“Gary Larson did have topics he touched on a lot, like biology and science,” Carrillo said. “Mine are more about your average Joe, people and life in general. I don’t try to not do an idea because I’m afraid someone will compare it to something else. If I think it’s funny, I will do it.”

There are pros and cons to having a self-contained strip. “Not having a regular character means each panel has to stand on its own,” he said. “I can’t rely on previous stories to set up a new joke. But on the plus side, I can set up any situation, any person to tell whatever joke I want to tell.”

Carrillo made the transition from college cartoonist to national syndication after entering the 2004 mtvU Strips Contest, in which online voters and judges, including Dilbert creator Scott Adams, voted for their favorites among 12 comics. Adams selected F Minus as his favorite.

“That was definitely a great foot in the door,” Carrillo said. “It was my senior year, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my art degree after college.” F Minus won with about 200,000 votes. Carrillo got a six-month development deal with United Feature Syndicate, after which the syndicate would decide if it wanted to carry the strip. The strip started in 2006 in 75 newspapers, and has expanded to 125 papers.

The title for F Minus came about after Carrillo tried to settle on a name among five or six candidates. “F Minus just kind of felt right,” he said. “Just the idea of a failing grade and then a little bit worse, that summed it up.”

And it gives his detractors an easy target. “That’s their favorite way to criticize this strip,” he said. “I can tell they think they’re being very clever, but I’ve heard it countless times, so I don’t mind.”

Readers can expect surreal jokes and gags about luckless characters in F Minus. “The workplace will come up often, and kids at school, because any time you draw a kid doing something out of the ordinary it’s funny,” he said. “And there are a lot of nerds, because I was a big nerd growing up, and still am.

“And then of course, clowns, because I hate them so much.”

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.

By Tim Clodfelter
JOURNAL REPORTER

Stephan Pastis, the cartoonist of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, knew when he was a child that he wanted to be a cartoonist. But he was too practical for his own good.

"When I was a little kid, I loved to draw, like most cartoonists," he said by phone from Santa Rosa, Calif. "But I knew going through school and everything that it wasn’t a practical choice. The odds of getting syndicated are slimmer than the odds of being an NBA player. So I decided to do something you can make a living at. I became a lawyer."

Specifically, he became a litigation attorney working for insurance companies in the San Francisco Bay area. That didn’t last long, though.

"I still drew on weekends and at night," he said. "In 1996, I started to get serious about being syndicated. I had been a lawyer for three years, and I just had to get out."

Not that he thinks so little of his former career, mind you. "I had a feeling of embarrassment, of moderate shame," he said. "Not because being a lawyer is bad. That’s too simplistic. But I felt I should be doing something else; I should be doing what I love. When you get to be 70, you don’t want to look back and regret. If you like being a lawyer, that’s great."

At 28, he decided he needed to chuck his first career and dove into cartooning. He developed several failed comic strips before hitting on Pearls.

His wife, Staci, didn’t say much about his decision. "She knew how much I disliked lawyering," he said. "But I didn’t quit right away. I was a syndicated cartoonist in January 2002 in newspapers, but I didn’t quit being a lawyer until August of 2002. I was in 70 papers then."

Now, he’s in close to 450 papers. His strip will get a one-month tryout starting Monday in the Winston-Salem Journal, as we look for a strip to replace Kudzu after the death of cartoonist Doug Marlette.

Pastis’ strip is a fast-paced comic about a small group of talking animals. Leading the cast are Rat, a sarcastic, abrasive rodent, and Pig, a sweet-hearted, dimwitted swine.

The title of the strip is a play on the Biblical passage "Neither cast ye your pearls before swine" and the fact that Rat believes he is sharing pearls of wisdom with Pig.

"Rat was somebody I drew in law school," he said. "He’s the part of you that is unfiltered and wants what you want and won’t be stopped. Pig is the child in most people - the loving part, the sweet part. They work well together. Rat by himself is just overwhelming."

The supporting cast includes Goat, who is smart but impatient, and Zebra, a long-suffering fellow who lives in a house with a pack of lions as neighbors on one side and a frat house full of crocodiles (The Brotherhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata) on the other.

If he had to choose just one character, Pastis said he would go with Rat. "I could write for Rat all day," he said, "but I’d lose half the papers I’m in. He’s my natural voice. That’s why no one wants to meet me."

He also picks on other cartoonists. He and Darby Conley, the creator of Get Fuzzy, are good friends and frequently throw jokes in their strips about one another. And Rat and gang frequently run afoul of other comic strip characters. The other cartoonists generally get a kick out of it - when he did a "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" strip recently implying that Beetle Bailey was gay, for instance, Beetle cartoonist Mort Walker asked if he could have the original art (Pastis complied). But fans sometimes take offense.

One recent source of complaints was a February strip in which Rat got drunk while babysitting the kids from Baby Blues and sent them on a beer run, where they ran over Jeremy from Zits. "The biggest (complaint) was that I was endangering the kids," Pastis said. "Those kids are made of pen and ink. They’re not real. They weren’t in any danger. It’s so weird. I don’t relate to that. News flash, they’re not real. What do I say? What do you do?"

When Pastis was developing his strip, he decided to go to the best source possible for advice on cartooning - a successful cartoonist. And since he lived nearby, Pastis chose the biggest of them all, Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts.

Knowing that Schulz owned an ice rink in Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco, Pastis took a day off from work in 1996. "I heard he had an English muffin at the same time every day, so I stalked him," he said. "He sat down and talked with me for an hour." Schulz looked over sample strips and made suggestions.

Jeannie Schulz, the widow of Charles, said that her husband always enjoyed being a mentor to younger cartoonists.

"I don’t think he ever thought they were younger than he was," she said. "There’s nothing he liked more than sitting around with other cartoonists and talking about cartooning and talking about the craft."

More than 10 years later, Pastis, 39, is still involved with Schulz’s work.

Three days a week, from Monday to Wednesday, he works at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, looking over potential licensed products and making sure that they remain true to the spirit of Peanuts. He is also on the museum’s board of directors. "Sometimes, I’ll go sit in his studio," Pastis said.

Then Thursday through Saturday, he draws Pearls Before Swine - six daily episodes, one Sunday installment, and one or two extras so he can stockpile for vacation time. He stays about seven months ahead, a far cry from the many fellow cartoonists who skirt their deadlines and stay only a few weeks ahead.

"I work in my boxers," he said.

"That’s a nice thing you can’t normally do. I go to a cafe in Calistoga, in Napa Valley, the wine region. It’s beautiful. I sit at the counter and write and write."

No, he doesn’t go to the cafe in his boxers. That comes later, at home, when he sits down at the drawing board and illustrates the cartoons he has scripted out.

"It’s a great profession," he said.

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.

Starting Monday, readers will see some new faces on the comics pages of the Winston-Salem Journal.

We’re beginning a six-month search for a replacement for Kudzu, which comes to an end Saturday following the death of cartoonist Doug Marlette.

For the next month, we’re going to be trying out the comic strip Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis. It’s about a group of wisecracking animals. Then in September we’ll be testing F-Minus, a quirky strip by Tony Carrillo, the winner of a nationwide college cartoonists contest.

That will be followed in October by Single and Looking, an acerbic look at the dating scene; in November we will publish Secret Asian Man, a strip by a second-generation Japanese-American; in December we will present The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, about a boy genius; and in January we will print The Other Coast, which blends joke-of-the-day comics with recurring characters.

The comics page will be juggled around a little bit to make room for the new contestants, which will be shown in the top right-hand corner of the second comics page each day.

Throughout the trial period, we’ll be soliciting your thoughts about the new strips at comics@wsjournal.com and through http://www.journalnow.com. And you can always write to us by “snail mail” too, at Comics, Winston-Salem Journal, PO Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101.

Test Strip No. 1
Aug. 6-Sept 1: PEARLS BEFORE SWINE/ United Media

Test Strip No. 2
Sept. 3-29: F-MINUS/ United Media        

Test Strip No. 3
Oct. 1-27:  SINGLE AND LOOKING/ Wash Post Writers

Test Strip No. 4
Oct. 29-Nov. 24: SECRET ASIAN MAN/ United Media

Test Strip No. 5      

Nov. 26-Dec. 22:  THE BRILLIANT MIND OF EDISON LEE/ King

Test Strip No. 6      
Dec. 24-Jan. 19:  THE OTHER COAST/ Creators